No BS: A glimpse of the real Bill Gates

Newspapers, magazines and blogs are saturated with reports about Bill Gates leaving daily life at Microsoft, to the point that people may be getting tired of it. (We’re already moving on to other topics around here.) But the coverage, collectively, has resulted in a new level of insight into Gates’ personality, how he thinks, and how he ran the company.

Along those lines, these were my favorite nuggets:

Before our interview with Gates, my colleague Tom Paulson and I decided to ask whether Gates’ notoriously blunt approach at Microsoft would work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. During the interview, I started the question by conceding that Gates may have mellowed over the years. He immediately cut me off — in a surprising way that cracked everyone up, including Gates, and revealed a lot of his personality. Here’s the audio clip. (Language advisory: His response includes an expletive.)

Among the many remembrances from former Microsoft employees and executives, one that stands out is Joel Spolsky’s essay in Inc. magazine, in which he recalls an early product-review meeting with Gates and explains what it taught him about Microsoft’s programmer-in-chief.

Rami Grunbaum, a Seattle Times deputy business editor who was a year behind Gates at Lakeside School, tells the fun story of an old programming book that he kept for years — despite Gates’ typewritten warning — and how Gates reacted when it was returned this month.

Finally, there’s the January 2003 rant that we published last week, about Gates’ struggle to download and run Movie Maker on his Windows PC. Via e-mail, some readers have been asking if it’s a spoof. For the record, the message is, in fact, real. Before publication, I verified its authenticity with people involved in Microsoft’s Iowa antitrust suit, the case that resulted in the disclosure of the message. Then, at the end of our interview, I showed a copy to Gates himself, to double-check.

Gates also referred to the message — and our exchange about it — at one point in his farewell address to employees last week:

“One of the newspapers had some e-mail that I sent about how maybe Windows could have been better at something, and they said, ‘This is a shocking e-mail. Shocking!’ And I said, ‘What do you think I do all day? Sending an e-mail like that, that is my job.’ That’s what it’s all about. We’re here to make things better.”

After all these years of media coverage, Gates should be allowed a misquote of his own, but for whatever it’s worth, we simply showed him the message and asked if he ever got Movie Maker to work, without expressing any shock. But more telling is the fact that Gates didn’t seem to understand why the message would be news to people.

The e-mail was not the public image of the Microsoft icon. It was a hidden side of Bill Gates — someone who, despite his unquestionable belief in the “magic of software,” can come just as close as the next guy to tossing his beloved PC out the window. Apart from the sheer hilarity of his Movie Maker saga, that’s why so many people found it refreshing.